


the bittersweet between my teeth (trying to find the in-betweens)

by arestlesswind



Series: The misadventures of Jamie Tiberius Kirk and her grumpy boyfriend Bones [4]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Genderbending, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-15
Updated: 2013-06-15
Packaged: 2017-12-15 01:16:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/843618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arestlesswind/pseuds/arestlesswind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four times Kirk tried to seduce Bones, one time it was the other way around, and the only time it worked. (Or, the story of how two idiots in love finally got their shit together.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the bittersweet between my teeth (trying to find the in-betweens)

**Author's Note:**

> It's a given for me that any version of Kirk and McCoy are in a relationship circa the movies. Naturally, because this is me we're talking about, I wondered how my version of fem!Kirk and Bones managed to work things out without utmost disaster. 
> 
> Hence, meta/feelings vomit disguised as sex fic.
> 
> Title nicked from Birdy's cover of "Young Blood." Eternal thanks to Loke, my soulmate my sun and stars the one who knows my Kirk/Bones heart, for the betaing and encouragement.

 

*

“Bones?”

“Hmm?”

He's off near the window with his face flat over a PADD, studying for whatever test he has tomorrow. Starfleet works their med cadets too damn hard, Jamie thinks. Or Bones works himself too hard. Either way.

“You know what we should do?” she asks from her position lounging on his roommate's unoccupied bed. (She sauntered through the doors and he suddenly remembered something urgent he had to do elsewhere.)

“Do I want to know?”

Jamie lowers her text on warp core mechanics, slowly, as if she'd had a revelation.

“We should have sex,” she says, and Bones chokes.

 

*

Her uniform skirt's very high, and she knows he notices.

Jamie doesn't have much leg at just under 5'2, but what she lacks in length she makes up for in _fantastic._ And right now they're in black leather boots and crossed one over the other on the bar stool.

“You can look, you know,” she tells him, just on the edge of slurred. “I don't mind.”

“Not interested, thanks,” he grunts.

“ _Excuse_ me? You don't think I'm pretty?”

“Of course I think – ”

Bones snaps his jaw shut. She can almost hear his teeth grinding and wonders if in twenty years he'll need them replaced. He leans closer and lowers his voice, not as if anyone can overhear and incriminate in the metal din of music and voices.

“You're a beautiful woman, Jamie, but I don't think of you. I mean, in that way.”

“Bullshit.”

She knocks back another shot with ease and hails the Andorian bartender.

“We're best friends, Bones. We've known each other for over a year. Hell, I'm practically your roommate – ”

“Yeah, maybe because you traumatized Clarence – ”

Jamie waves him off. “I'm attractive, you're attractive, we like each other – why aren't we fucking?”

“Well, if you aren't a charmer. Plenty of reasons I don't feel like repeating. We talked about this.”

Jamie snorts. “Talking, you mean you nearly had a heart attack and avoided me for a week.”

Bones slams down his barely-touched glass and shoves up from the bar. “I'm going to bed,” he snarls. “ _Alone._ Which you should do, too.”

“Are you lecturing me, man?”

“Am I...?” He openly gapes, eyes wide and oh-so brown. It's an adorable image. “Jamie, I don't give a good goddamn who you sleep with or don't. It's your life.”

“So you don't judge me?”

“Why the hell would I judge you? I'll judge you for failing your exams, not for doing something as normal as consensually having sex.”

She always figured, always guessed he only complained because Bones complains about _everything_ , especially everything to do with one Jamie Kirk. But it's still nice to know.

(Jamie remembers when she turned down an insistent asshole of an older cadet and he called her _the slut of Starfleet, I'll bet I'm the only man who hasn't had you_ and she broke his nose in three places, and Bones seethed, _that fucking bastard,_ fussed and cleaned the blood off her face and at the time it felt a little like love.)

Now he sighs in that surrendering way that strips all his protests to flimsy naughts, reaches over, and ruffles her hair. “Get some sleep, kid,” he says, weary fondness. “Don't forget you have the Maru tomorrow.”

“Nah, I'm good. I got that baby covered. Sure you don't want company?” she calls after his retreating back.

“Go to _sleep,_ Jamie _,_ ” he barks as the bar doors hush behind him.

 

*

“Mother of _God,_ Jamie, _why are you in my bed?_ ”

She levels him her best seductive smirk, propped on one elbow with a sheet casually tossed to her collarbone. “Why do you think?”

“Oh, hell no. Get out. Get out of there right now, or I swear I'll...”

“Fine, fine, if you say so.”

“Thank you. I don't know about you, but I've got actual work to do and _oh my god put your clothes on_ Jesus Mary fucking _goddamn_ you're _unbelievable_...”

Bones refuses to look at her for the rest of the day. That's fine by Jamie. The image of him spinning around so fast he tripped to the floor will make her laugh for days.

 

*

She didn't plan to kiss him. She did plan on getting drunk and finding someone (Gaila, maybe, if she's up for it again) interested in casual, friendly sex, cause she's in the mood.

But she's leaning her body into him, and her hand's in the hair at the nape of his neck, and mouths are meeting and it's sloppy and messy and she _likes_ it.

“You're drunk,” Bones murmurs against her lips.

“Damn straight I am. And I'm really, really, really interested in screwing you senseless.”

She kisses him a second time. Likes it even better, his lips pleasantly cool and his tongue a sweet tang from whiskey. He likes his harder drinks, her Bones, with his three-day stubble and his coarse Southern mouth and his calloused hands and his long, long legs.

Speaking of hands. One hooked at the curve of her waist, the other wrapped around the wrist attached to the arm she has flung over his shoulders. There's no one else in the hallway, their peers otherwise engaged. Her footing isn't steady; she seeks out support and leans deeper, breasts pressing to his torso, hips against thighs, and Bones's breath catches, hard and wrenched out and pained and in the most _wonderful_ way she wants to hear again and again against her ear. He stumbles, his back sliding against the wall and his grip on her tightening in a reflex action, same as when she runs up stairs or arms her phaser or the rise before a shuttle takeoff.

His hands are warm, so warm through the light fabric of her t-shirt.

“Jamie, I...” he whispers, “I don't know if...I don't know if I can do this again.”

An ex-wife and a daughter and no home left on Earth. Jamie guesses he's had hook-ups, friends with benefits, one-nights, knows because she's seen the occasional hickeys and teased him ruthlessly until he blushed red as an engineer's shirt. Sex is great. He likes sex.

But she's _Jamie Kirk,_ his _best friend_ and everything that entails and there's something in the way he looks at her, no one's looked at her like that since her first crush in primary school and sometimes, in the right second, it kind of takes her breath away and makes her want to burrow deep inside him and fly with him through constellations, hand-in-hand at her side, he's emotionally compromised...

She pulls back. Nuzzles her nose against his cheek. He presses her close.

“I know,” she says. “It's okay, Bones. Whatever, whenever, if ever.”

She cocks her head up at him. Maybe it's the Romulan ale, maybe it's the stubborn romanticism she can't displace.

But sometimes, Leonard McCoy has stardust in his eyes.

“I like you a lot, you know,” she says.

“Yeah, and I don't like you one bit.”

“You're too sweet.”

He notches the glare up times five and she swears a lovely tight vein in his neck's set to burst. She wants to mouth it soft and deep, feel his pulse flutter and his breath hitch again; memorize what causes those sounds and how his body twists, but there are some lines Jamie Kirk knows better not to cross.

Not yet.

Not like she gets her chance, when Bones levels her away until space exists. The separation hurts like a plunge into ice.

“What even are you,” he growls.

It's after 2600 and Christine Chapel opens her door, hair slightly frazzled from sleep, with a robe over her nightgown and an expectant face.

“Hi, Leonard,” she greets, smirking.

“Hey, Chris,” he says. “Sorry, she's...”

“No worries,” Christine says. “I got her. Hand her over.”

Christine takes Jamie and gets her into bed. Shoos the hovering Bones out the door, holds Jamie's hair over the toilet when she throws up forty minutes later.

“I think my best friend is in love with me,” Jamie mutters, head hanging upside down.

Christine cleans the sweat off the nape of her neck with a cool towel. “You're just now catching on to that?”

 

*

Shore leave lasts four days. Jamie spends the first half in Iowa, the second in Georgia (order decided by coin flip). He says it's to settle once and for all their longstanding argument by showing her _the superiority of the South._

(Which she admits is beautiful, the endless treelines stripped barren and the rolling mountains specked with clouds dwarfing Iowa's tallgrass prairie hills; they ascend and she parks herself atop a rocky clearing, draws her knees up to her chin. She watches, something resembling peace settling warm and heavy in her joints, and when she turns to talk to Bones and the shivering chill wind catches strands of hair in her mouth, she realizes he hasn't been looking at nature.)

But instead Bones spends most of their stay insistently insisting _no she is not my girlfriend_ and seething at her for _not helping one bit._

Jamie just rocks back on her heels and smirks.

Except when she's sharing the same airspace as his ex-wife and his daughter and Jamie bows quiet back into the shadows, this is not her place. Pamela is a tall bold woman with assurance and brittle power woven through to her core and she looks at her briefly and Jamie suddenly feels very small and very young and very guilty. _I'm just a friend,_ she assures, _we're not together, I'm not...here to cause anything,_ and Pamela flicks a slow smile and says, _I appreciate that. But if you were dating, I wouldn't care. It's been over two years,_ and Jamie lets out a deep, long breath.

She watches.

Joanna is a whirlwind in the shape of a girl, taller than Jamie remembers from the holograms, and she attacks her father with a shriek and tumbles him to the carpeted floor. Jamie feels she's peeking behind the curtain, squinting through the keyhole, she shouldn't be here and yet she's a special granted; this new side of Leonard McCoy, she's never seen him so happy or at ease except when they're planetside and they stroll in step and his arm's slung snug over her shoulders.

She recognizes his droll smirk in Joanna's soft sweet youthful mouth. She lifts her high and spins her through the air, smiling when she laughs and thinking of home, Mom, Sam and herself in reverse. (She hasn't ruled out kids but no priority is lower, there's so much to _do_ first and there's a reason so few women captain starships even in the 23rd century. If she must choose family or the stars, the stars won decades ago because she was born to them.)

But she plops Joanna on her lap and whispers to her about space and explorers and dreams come true.

And Bones looks at them, and when she looks over at him and offers a smile she can almost physically see the shift in his face, a tectonic plate beneath the rumbling earth.

(If Jamie Kirk is the stars, Bones is her gravity.)

“She's something else,” Jamie says after Joanna's tucked in bed with a kiss and a goodnight wave to the new-found Aunt Jamie. The lights are down; everyone's asleep.

“Yeah,” Bones agrees, softly, ardently, his face a map of love.

They're facing each other in the hallway outside Joanna's room. Jamie props her hand on her cocked hip and drums a finger. Bones's eyes flick to the visible pulse-beat beneath her skin.

He surges forward and kisses her. Cups one side of her face with his large warm calloused rough hand and hooks the other into the curve of her waist, yanking urging pleading her forward until even the miniscule space between them is decimated. Jamie responds instantly, it's her starting pistol, pushing herself to the tips of her toes and clenching a fist in his hair. Lips slide needy and wanting - Bones kisses like a man with nothing left to lose, broken and stitched apart in every wrong way and Jamie Kirk is his maybe, _maybe,_ and Jamie wants nothing more in this entire damn universe than to fill those gaping salted wounds. Bones is a goddamn fucking martyr, incapable of turning that meticulous care back onto himself, and probably a bit of a masochist, too.

What other reason would he kiss her as if she had the salt of the earth between her teeth.

In short, all this converges and translates into the yearning to take care of _him_ for once. His hands are so warm and large and rough and blunt and _yes_ and she shivers oh so nicely, and when he gathers her up in his arms, toned and broad and the object of so many hours of obscene fantasy, Jamie's unsure he'll ever let go.

And what's more, she never wants him to.

(She'll never be held down, but he is grounding, not shackling, the center her life orbits.)

“You sure?” she whispers.

Bones murmurs, rumbling and raw, “Yeah.”

He leads/guides/tugs/drags her into his bedroom, kicks the door defiantly shut. They're scrambling in the rush to shed clothes, his sweater her shirt her jeans, because nothing has ever been more important than getting this beautiful gorgeous infuriatingly sexy and simply infuriating man naked _right now_. Jamie wants him spread out against sheets, flushed and wrecked and mindless from bliss. She wants the taste of his sweat on her tongue and to see the look on his face when he comes.

She shoves him onto the bed and pounces him, sitting crouched astride his lap, kisses him hungry and deep and his palms soothe back and forth up her naked spine, her clenched thighs, tug her bound hair free and tangle themselves within. It's careful and thorough, tender and curious, and exactly how she expects Bones would touch, willingly surrendered. They've waited so long they _deserve_ to take their time. They're just this side of too hard but it's ardency and something in Jamie's ribcage screams, ruined and gasping, to adore and be adored.

And even though they're clinging to a mountain ledge with worn nails they must be doing so together, because they're smiling, laughing. Bones lovingly shushes her not to wake Joanna and rolls her swiftly onto her back with a hidden strength, pinning her down and tiny Jamie squirms delighted beneath the weight and the heat of him, moaning openly into his mouth, aroused and eager and _ready_. She takes him inside with a soft sigh – content, eyes closed, cradling the back of his head into the arch of her throat. _Ohhhh, yes, yes god just like that, there, christ that's so sweet,_ and _you're beautiful, fuck you're so beautiful, Jamie I love you, oh god, oh Jamie, Jamie, Jamie._

They catch their breath afterward, shivering from slowly-cooling sweat and listening to the hum of ships outside, the rush of crickets.

Bones clears his throat.

“Was that...okay?” he asks. Suddenly shy, his voice husked.

Jamie rolls languorous onto her side, loving the way Bones's eyes fix to her bare skin like the wanderer to his north star.

“That,” she says, “was way better than okay.”

Bones exhales, nods several times in quick succession. “Should probably do it again, then.”

Jamie grins. She leans over and kisses his chest twice, rests her chin there when Bones's hand moves to stroke through her hair.

“So does this make us girlfriend and boyfriend?” she volunteers.

He snorts. “Don't get ahead of yourself, kid.”

 

*

Things she learns very quickly: as a lover, Bones is very passionate, very dedicated, very stubborn, and very precise, and a little rough-and-tumble in a good way. And she is very, very appreciative.

“God _damn_ ,” she gasps between breaths, “what are they teaching you over in medicine?”

She loosens her death-grip on his hair, having left marks on his tender scalp only they'll know. But it's an equal trade, the colorful hand-shaped imprints she can already feel blossoming from where Bones's hands gripped firm her hips, the pleasant burn of stubble between her thighs.

“Oh, sweetheart. I promise you there's more where that came from.”

He growls low and soft in a pitch Jamie's recently caused, discovered, named her own – shying on exasperation but something wonderfully altogether new, as he gently massages the back of her legs. Making sure she's all right, giving her time to come down, because he's a gruff sweet overattentive fussing _harpy._

“Good,” she says. “Cause that is the best thing that mouth of yours has ever done.”

“I swear to god, you make one more half-assed crack and I'm gonna haul you over my knee and give you the smacking you deserve.”

“Is that supposed to scare me? Cause actually, that sounds fantastic. What are you doing later?”

“ _That sounds_ – ” A furious, delightful red spreads fast and deep up his neck. “Last time I do anything nice for you.”

Bones levers up off his knees in front of her. But before he can fully stand, Jamie shoves herself off the wall she was leaning against and tackles him, pushing him down onto his back on the sickbay floor.

“The hell _–_ Jamie, I'm getting too old for this shit, I'm not some teenage...”

Between her kiss and the way she shifts deliberately against his lap, Bones ceases complaining nice and fast.

This is _so_ much better than going to class.

(When they returned from shore leave they skipped for two entire days, Jamie would tolerate nothing less, and she was this close to running up and down the halls yelling with joy and banging down peoples' doors, and Christine winked at them and Bones looked fit to die on the spot.)

“I don't know, old man,” Jamie purrs as she bites his jaw. “You seem to be keeping up pretty well.”

Making up for lost time, Bones calls it; Jamie says she unleashed a sex-crazed monster version of Leonard McCoy and it ain't going back in its cage. It's been two weeks, and she's keeping a running tally of all the Academy premises they've found inventive uses for. If she's not dragging him into abandoned rooms, he's tossing her over his shoulder and carrying her off wherever he damn well pleases.

And proceeding to _do_ whatever he damn well pleases, with her enthusiastic consent.

She likes assertive Bones. It's _hot._

(But she loves him even more staring up at her, adoration in his eyes and his heart on his lips. God, what a fantastic picture. God, the things she wants to _do_ with this man.)

Bones tries to suppress a pained groan and fails. “Woman,” he murmurs, “you're gonna be the death of me.”

Jamie beams down at him as she unhooks his belt. “C'mon, Bones,” she says, “you know you love me.”

He pulls her dress up beneath her arms. “Yeah, well,” he says, “that's the problem, now, isn't it?”

 

*


End file.
